At least yours runs them. Both IE6 and Firefox crashed as soon as I try and pan around them. Click-scroll-crash. Fun!

In any case, these are simply amazing. I recommend everyone who likes these take a look at some videos of the game [elderscrolls.com]. They have some new ones on there I haven't seen yet, but I've watched all the E3 Demo videos and those are amazing.

This game truly blows everything else out of the water in terms of sheer scope and graphical achievem

So, you are saying that this kind of bug only is found when porting to another platform? That's intresting. I thought you'd find bugs by testing the software, no matter what platform you are developing for.

Okay, stuff like memory corruption can sometimes be found more easily when porting, but this is clearly a logic bug that doesn't have to do anything with the platform it runs on.

Yes I would like to have the game on Linux too. But it honestly, it would be just as buggy there as it is on Windows.

Thats because it is a quicktime panorama. Quicktime is not a very well writen program (expecially on windows). It is not hardware accelerated. Bascially, your computer is doing mathmatical warping of a GIGANTIC image in real time to wrap it around you in a sphere.
I used to do work creating QTVR 360 panoramas. Not fun stuff, even on a dual P3 800 (top of the line back them).

I bought it impulsively last night, having never played any games in the series. I haven't been this entranced since Ocarina of Time. It feels so real it's scary - this game is what role playing is all about.

It runs at about 20 FPS at the 'autodetected' level. (For reference, the 'autodetected level is 'high'. I'm pushing alot of polygons, so I'm sure that's why It's not running that well. It scales well though, but you really don't want to sacrifice visual quality in this game.

Aww, damn...I have an AMD64 3200, x800 Pro 256MB, and 1GB...this is pretty much exactly the recommended system and I was hoping I could scrape by. I mean, I'm getting 70fps at 1600x1200 in Half-Life 2. I was going to upgrade just the RAM pretty soon, but you're already sitting at 2 gig and talking about upgrading.Here's a good question: anybody played Oblivion on a dual-core system yet? Oblivion was supposed to be the first game to natively support dual-core at launch. I want to know if a dual-core system k

I know some people who are playing Oblivion on a dual core rig. The don't "kick nads", but both cores are used indeed (>60% load for both) and Oblivion isn't CPU-limited on these rigs (one issue that many people in Oblivion have is that when you get a "good enough" graphic card such as an X1900 or a 7800GTX+, or a 7800/7900 SLI rig, and you crank up the details/quality your system becomes CPU-bound...)

My machine is a:AMD Athlon 64 3500+nVidia GeForce 6800GT1 GB DDR dual-channel...and the game runs fine with good quality. The FPS will sometimes (but not that often) dip below 20, but it still plays very well. As in Morrowind, but even more so, you can do marvellous things with the Oblivion.ini file and people in community have already started tweaking the hell out of the game.

You'll be fine, mostly, but cranking every damn setting up to max will probably bring your computer to a crawl. But you'd notice on

I have a quite dated gaming machine. Quake4 was the first game I could not play due to low FPS. I am tempted to buy Oblivion and see how it runs, but I am trying to hold out until I upgrade. I will be upgrading to a rig similar to what you have. Right now I am looking at perhaps an Athlon64 3000+ or Sempron64 3300+, 2GB PC3200, and a GF 6600 or 7300 video card.

If you have anything earlier than a GeForce 6000 series card (I can't name the ATI equivalent), it runs very badly. As for the game itself, I have mixed feelings. Go in with low expectations about the AI and stuff, and you'll probably be fine.

Just remember that Oblivion is built to scale with your capabilities. As graphics cards and computers keep improving, so will some of the graphics of Oblivion. Draw distance will get longer, texture blending will improve, and the shadows should scale, too.

Gamers on various forums are starting to explore the expansive INI settings available. You can easily crash your game, but there are some promising improvements out there already of things that make the game look even better if you have the equipment to support it.

In case you didn't know, the grass is generated by the game itself based on the climate and terrain type. The floor of a forest will be more sparse and rugged than open expansive plains where there is almost too much grass. When terrain gets too high/steep, the foliage thins.

After you murder a few people, make sure you don't go to sleep in a dungeon filled with traps... the Dark Brotherhood representative will come to you as you sleep, offer you a position with them, then leave the dungeon-- walking THROUGH all the traps and dying, making it impossible to join the Dark Brotherhood. Bastards!

Even in the most open-ended of games, and this is surely one, you can run into stuff the developers didn't plan for.

The embargo and lack of review copies is a good indicator that a game has problems. As is, overwhelmingly positive "reader reviews" showing up within an hour of daybreak on the east coast aren't a good sign either.I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen shots? There's a really good reason for that...I'm not saying it sucks, I've not even played it (I will buy it, eventually). But I did play some of their other games.Morrowind got into a playa

The draw distance is startlingly far on the PC version. Yes, it's noticeable... but less so than most of the games we were playing in 2001. And what it draws... oh my gosh. It's beautiful.Unlike Morrowind, it also actually has gameplay. All sorts of little things that never made sense in Morrowind are fixed here. You can tell which of your goods are stolen. You can tell which things you're not legally allowed to touch, so that when you go for them, you at least sneak first. There's a visibility meter. The s

All sorts of little things that never made sense in Morrowind are fixed here. You can tell which of your goods are stolen.

When i got Morrowind and played for a few hours i thought i'd gonna love that game but all that stupidity about stealing totally ruined it for me. Add to that all those crates in open places, you could legally take stuff from most of these, but take from some others and you had someone shouting 'Thief'. Yuck! If they fixed that i might give it a try. Hmm, maybe i should try a pirated ver

>>The embargo and lack of review copies is a good indicator that a game has problems. As is, overwhelmingly>> positive "reader reviews" showing up within an hour of daybreak on the east coast aren't a good sign>>either.Actually, it is a very very good game (though it has its bugs, like all Bethesda games).

>>I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen>> shots? There's a really good reason for that...

Go to My Documents\My Games\Oblivion and edit oblivion.ini. Search for [grass]. The first parameter (on mine) is grass density, defaults to 80. Knock that up a bit. The higher the number, the sparser the grass. You can find a nice balance between performance and looks that way, and the sparseness of it improves the visibility as you say. I like "160" myself.

I can understand your being circumspect in these days of PR hacks, paid-for review scores, astro-turfing and genuine fanboys. And yes, I do realize that you don't really have any guarantee that I'm not either, but I'll throw my 2p in anyway.

"I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen shots? There's a really good reason for that..."

The biggest slow-down on my machine was the grass, and I suspect that's the really good reason there: grass makes for great screenshots, but really _kills_ frame rates unless you lower the rendering distance. On the bright side, you can turn it off, which helps performance a _lot_. (On the even brighter side, turning it off makes all the alchemy plants much easier visible.)

And that's just one option. There is really plenty of room to tweak the graphics even more than that. You can turn it all down to really low res and polycounts, or play with the render distance, or whatever. Heck, you can easily turn it into something that's lighter on the graphics than Morrowind was. (Not that it'll look much better, but you won't need much better hardware either.)

"I'm not saying it sucks, I've not even played it (I will buy it, eventually). But I did play some of their other games."

I understand why someone would want to extrapolate from previous experience and take (semi)informed guesses when making a personal decision (e.g., buy it or not), and indeed we all do all the time. Unfortunately, that doesn't really offer any guarantees about Oblivion. In the end, it can be good, or it can be bad, or something in between, regardless of what the previous games have been like.

"Morrowind got into a playable "ready for release" state about the time the first expansion came out. "

Morrowind had many problems, yes, but Oblivion isn't Morrowind. It's not just that it doesn't have the same technical problems, it also doesn't have the bland NPCs and generic quests, etc. In other words, if you consider the first expansion what Morrowind should have been, well, then you might actually like Oblivion. It's far closer to Tribunal than to Morrowind in most aspects.

"This is, I think, the kind of game Bethesda would release if it weren't for Microsoft's hand in the mix."

I don't know if it's MS's hand or not, but that's OK, because I don't really care. All that matters is whether the game is any good or not. Exactly how much of it is MS's merit and how much is Bethesda's, is a best an academic exercise, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Either the game is fun or it isn't, and in the end that's all that matters.

But if you want to talk about the games Bethesda did release without MS, those include releasing a FPS actually _before_ Wolfenstein 3D. It also featured driving vehicles and outdoors city scenes. Long before the big name FPSes featured any of those. And, yeah, you could run pedestrians down with the car long before GTA2. It just wasn't textured, but it was in every other aspect a better game than Doom or Quake that came _years_ later. Or they include stuff like Terminator: Future Shock, which invented full mouse-look. In effect, they invented the interface every single modern FPS uses. Etc.

Even in the "The Elder Scrolls" category, Arena was pretty stable and a fun RPG (plus it had some amazing technical stuff, like having 80 _million_ square km of terrain, not counting the dungeons), and they had stuff in there that debatably wasn't even an RPG. E.g., Redguard or Battlespire. I.e., it included more than Daggerfall and Morrowind to base an extrapolation on.

Heck, they even made at least one Mario game.

So basically it's pretty hard to accurately paint Bethesda with a one-liner wisecrack. The stuff they did was really extremely diverse,

Why? I mean, they do... kind of, they suggest that the game is entirely open-ended (i.e. nothing stops me from going to sleep in the middle of a bunch of traps), and that the NPCs in the game carry on their own lives and their own activities (i.e. won't just disappear after the meeting, but will walk back to wherever.) The only thing this tells you about the game is that the AI isn't adept at avoiding traps, or at least not the AI on this particular NPC.I'm enjoying the game immensely despite that quirk,

When reading about the immense excitement this game seems to generate among enthusiasts, I'm tempted to go out and purchase it. However, I did try Morrowind for a few hours (PC), and I was never engaged. I've played NWN, the Baldur's Gate series, and KotOR, and enjoyed them all, so perhaps I've been conditioned to expect a Bioware sort of game (although I've played through hack and slash-ish stuff like Diablo and Dungeon Siege, but wasn't really a fan) with the associated linearity. The whole clicking to swing your sword thing, and the washed out color scheme didn't really do it for me, but perhaps I should give it another try.

Also, is a familiarity with Morrowind a pre-requisite to playing Oblivion?

Oblivion jumps into the game and quests much better than Morrowind did. At least for me, it grabbed my attention much better and puts you in the game, wanting to play. One thing to remember there are hundreds (thousands?) of side and mini quests int he game, the main story doesnt stretch all the game can do.

The Elder Scrolls games require a bit more investment from the player to make them work, but if you're willing to put in the effort they are massively rewarding. I started the series with Morrowind, and for the first few hours I thought I had made a mistake in purchasing it... it felt too open-ended, and I was too accustomed to being told what to do (even the BioWare games are more rigid than this). However, once I really started playing it became my favorite game ever. The only reason I'm here typing this right now instead of playing Oblivion is that I can't afford the necessary hardware upgrades.

Familiarity with Morrowind is not necessary for Oblivion. All of the Elder Scrolls games share a common world, but take place in different areas and have independent stories. If you've played the previous games you'll likely get a bit more from the story, but it's not required to enjoy it.

Though I liked what it was trying to do, I hated Morrowind. On the other hand, I got Oblivion a few days ago and love it. Trust me, lack of engagement by Morrowind isn't uncommon, but Obvlivion totally compltetely makes up for it. All you give up is Levetation, Mark, Recall and the ability to twink your charactor to make things too easy (if you do twink your charactor to hell, the enemies will scale up with you and things get very very tough)

In most games, if you could just set all your stats to max you'd be able to beat any creature in the game with a stick. You wouldn't need Fancy Sword of Smiting.

In Oblivion it's different. If you just pimp out your attack stats, your enemies are going to be stronger in proportion. This has to happen because the world is so wide open. They don't know where you're going to go, and they can't put the stronger enemies "later" in the game.

However, as your non-attack stats go up, you have more options open to you. Speechcraft and mercantile make it easier to get potions and equipment. Learning spells opens up new tactics. Most importantly, learning new alchemy recipes allows you to make excellent potions.

The alchemy thing is *huge*. In many games, even if you know the combination for a lock or the recipe for soup, you're not allowed to make the soup or open the lock until a character tells you how. In Oblivion, if you know how you can do it anytime. Your stats will affect how long this takes, but they won't stop you as such.

What's rewarded is therefore learning about the game world, not pimping your stats. Once you've read enough recipe books on people's shelves, learned about the history, figured out the enchantment system, etc, you can really trounce anybody you run into. Put another way, if there were PvP in the game, an educated player with decent stats would win against a novice player with maxed stats every time.

Of course, if you look at a strategy guide this whole progression is toast, because it's inside you rather than enforced by the computer's dice. I like that. It annoys me that even if I know all the answers in Final Fantasy, I have to spend 45 hours pushing buttons. In Oblivion if I know all the answers, I can go straight to the places where the best weapons are stored, brew up potions, go to the master trainers.... It's my competence that determines my fate. So I stay the hell away from forums and strategy guides, and on the official Elder Scrolls forums the admins enforce the separation between the hardware, bug, and story discussion rooms with an iron fist.

It's not perfect, but that's because they really are the only ones out there doing this kind of game. Trying to combine total world freedom with a decent gameplay progression is damn hard. GTA avoids the issue by mostly dumping the idea of progression. Final Fantasy dumps the freedom. Elder Scrolls tries to combine both, and they're getting closer.

Who wants to read freakin' cookbooks about imaginary ingredients which make imaginary food? What's next, a game where you pretend to clean your imaginary house?

This is kind of how I feel. It is obvious that the key to success and enjoyment of this game is to interact with the characters to collect knowledge of the game world. But to me, the characters are not appealing and the game world is straight off the cover art of some cheap fantasy novel. Since I'm not into reading cheap fantasy novels, I'm left with

I don't know if I'll like it or not. I've never tried it. That's why I said my interest was piqued, not "Oh, wow, that's obviously a great idea!"

I've done the Squaresoft-esque thing, though. And while I know I like it, I also know it's a bit limiting and gets a bit old after a while. I also can't help but step back every once in a while, and realize how incredibly stupid the whole exercise is sometimes.

Most games are, ultimately. I'm up for a new brand of stupidity every once in a while.

Is anyone else running Windows XP 64-bit and able to run the iTunesSetup.exe? I'm getting the error: "The image file iTunesSetup.exe is valid, but is for a machine type other than the current machine."

This game doesn't yet work with cedega [transgaming.com] (a commercially developed fork of wine for gaming), but it's now the #1 game voted for by subscribers so the folk at transgaming will be working on it.

As technology continues to improve, crates and boxes in video games keep looking better and better. I can't wait to pick up this game so that I can go through it and break dozens of those gorgeous crates.

Hmm, lots of staples definitely but the game more then makes up for them with the huge detailed environment and the voluntary nature of all the quests. Sure lots of people want to give you all kinds of quests, but they are totally optionally.I'd say that there is nothing vague about the quests. So far they've all been totally sensical and a decent number of them had some kind plot turn or something unexpected.

It definitely feels like it's own genre of game. The way all enemies scale up their power based

Thats enough for me to not buy it. What's the point of getting better equipment and skills if all your opponents do to? Why not just supply MORE tougher opponents. I don't want to be fighting the same damn orcs after 20 hours of game play, for me that destroys any sense of accomplishment at all in the game. I hated it in FF8 and I'll hate it in this. Maybe if they make a patch later on to make the enemies getting more powerful optional. To me making the enemies ramp up with the player character sounds

I'd hazard a guess that the main reason for the enemies ramping up with the player is because of the open nature of the game. I've currently put in 10 hours without touching the main story except for the starting tutorial. When I eventually head back to the main arc, it's definitely a good thing that the quests will still provide the same challenge.

Only humanoid enemies 'level up' with you- all of the creature enemies are divided into rough classes which swap out enemy types within a class as you level up. For example, at low level you encounter wolves out in the forrest- as you level up, you don't encounter stronger wolves, you encounter larger more deadly animals that match that environemnt and creature class.

or she might just tell you to fuck off and leave her alone.One of the main things they've promised with Oblivion is that the NPCs have their own lives and go about their business - they're not just placed somewhere for the sole purpose of meeting you.

Even morrowind wasn't really like that - NPCs didn't move much like they're supposed to in Oblivion, but they also weren't all there to give you a quest. Quite a lot of them just told you to get the hell out of their way, or would just say "hi" pleasantly as y

One of the main things they've promised with Oblivion is that the NPCs have their own lives and go about their business - they're not just placed somewhere for the sole purpose of meeting you.

So it's only taken them fourteen years to catch up with Ultima VII [wikipedia.org]?

/jk, though that's one of the things that bugged me about Morrowind... amazing 3D graphics, beautiful environment, open-ended gameplay, but NPCs as dumb as rocks - when over a decade ago they were baking bread, going to the tavern, closing windows,

The RadiantAI system is streaks ahead of Morrowind, IMO. The towns and cities are more or less empty at night (except for the guards and a few beggars), the shops are closed (doors have various levels of locks on them). The NPC's have conversations with each other, get in to fights etc etc.. The world is a lot more dynamic as well, like killing a bandit on the edge of steep mountain there's every chance the killing blow will send him over the edge and you'll never find the body to loot it..

I liked Morrowind and the advance shots of Oblivion looked great, so I picked it up the other day. Now I just wish I could play. My system's a little behind the curve, but it runs stuff like WoW and HL2 on around medium settings with no problems at all. However, I can't even get through the character generator in Oblivion on absolutely minimal graphics settings without crashing.Athlon XP 3200+1 Gig DDR RAMGeForce FX 5700 w/ 256 RAMetc and sundry.

Ummm... This doesn't sound like your system is too slow. It just sounds like a bug in the game. Make sure you have the latest drivers for everything, etc. Inform the developer of the problem you are having, put the game back in the box and wait for a patch/update/service pack.

and my MB was the last generation before PCI express as well (they had a few intel ones out, but I wanted AMD). CPU is at 100%, so more CPU should help. And to be honest, the game for me is at least playable, but at 800x600 resolution, which sort of blows for a 2006 game. Turn the max view distance on and you can really see the difference.

I'm sort of wishing I got an xbox360 and a VGA adapter (no HD TV yet). It would be cheaper th

You should be able to play the game, unless your vid card is holding you back and I don't think it'd be that much. FWIW I'm running the game on an AMD64-3500+ with 1gig ram and and ati x800xt aiw with all the eyecandy on (except hdr lighting, the x800 don't do that) and only get noticeably low frame rates (the occasional brief stutter) in crowded situations, and those usually improve after half a second or so as the game (I assume) adapts.
My brother is doing fine with only mar

I have an almost identical system - A64 3400+/1GB but I have an AGP GF6600GT. The game runs quite well on medium/large textures @ 1024 (especially after installing the new nvidia beta drivers specially optimized for the game - rev 84.25). Perusing newegg I see you can get a 6600GT for 100 bucks now. Not a top of the line card but it's still quite powerful.

It gets worse, even the loot is scaled to fit your level. So no finding phat loot in dungeons that will yield some awesome sword that you can hold onto until your big and strong enough to wield it.

I really love the game, but it has some fucking annoying issues. The game levelling as you go is the major one. Gothic 1 and 2 (and hopefully 3) had no qualms about making all areas accesible but many suicidal until you were sufficently strong enough to tackle the creatures in that region. As it stands at the mo